Presenting the "other" side of academic physics, where people
backstab and give lousy talks. Where people are sometimes lazy
or incompetent, and the best don't get the credit or the job.
From the perspective of someone lucky enough to have landed a
tenure-track professorship.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Age

Signs I'm getting old:

As the Community College Dean points out, "I lost the ability to do circular rides without bad side effects somewhere around thirty," though for me it occurred later.

I'm usually the last to get cold, and slippers were just for getting the paper in the morning. Now, on cold days, I look for slippers to keep my feet warm.

There are more, but I can't remember (a sign unto itself!).

Quantum, in modern, common usage, tries to sound like science and therefore should bare some resemblance to its usage by physicists. With that said, it should therefore connote a discrete quantity. But more than that because otherwise you could just use the word discrete. So what it really should connote is a quantity of something that would normally be thought continuous, and therefore it has to be a terribly small, discrete quantity. In that sense, most common usage is just plain wrong. Of course, I still used the term nuke to cook something in a microwave oven (which is far from nuclear both in size/wavelength and the fact that we're not bombarding the food with any nucleons!).

Have you heard who won Survivor: Gabon? What skills would the oldest Survivor winner have to possess to win? Oh, I don't know, maybe just intimate knowledge of physics, that's all.

1 comment:

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